I’ve been hearing from a lot of my friends lately that they have been doing their best to follow God’s plans for their lives, in many cases making huge sacrifices or taking great risks. But now that they’ve sacrificed out of love and obedience, they look around at their current situation, and it’s not what they expected. Either the ministry didn’t bear the kind of fruit they were hoping for, or they are back from ministering, and find things missing from their lives, like income, jobs, homes, or relationships. And they wonder, “What went wrong?” Did they mess up, and so somehow missed God’s blessing? Or did God just let them down?
Perhaps our trouble is we are judging our lives by the standards of this world, or more likely, letting people in the Church judge us – people who have only learned to see with natural eyes and not from a heavenly perspective. Perhaps the Church has been too influenced by a culture of success borrowed from the world, and has lost its ability to really understand and see from the Bible that great sacrifice and loss are all part of the witness of Scripture – the witness of the great people of faith that went before us.
Maybe there is a third option. In order to get a clearer perspective on situations like these, I think it would be good to take a look at Jesus’ life, or the Apostle Paul’s life, or the lives of other saints, to see from their examples that they also made great sacrifices, and also ended up in difficult situations, maybe situations similar to what my friends are experiencing – maybe even worse.